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HOOPTOBER XII NIGHT FIFTEEN: First Hooptober movie of October proper, taking us to almost the halfway point in the challenge. Really bummed that this one didn't quite live up to its trailer. I am not a football fan or a sports fan in general, so I worried going in that maybe I wouldn't have the background to understand certain things about this movie; But after seeing it, I kind of wonder if the filmmakers truly understood their subject either? Unlike the very similar OPUS (2025), this one at least *behaves* like a horror movie early on, combining a wild media-collage style with near-subliminal editing to create a feeling of unease from the outset. However, the script feels more like a big word cloud of concepts that Tipping and his collaborators wanted to touch upon in their big satire of professional sports culture and celebrity and race, where the line of best fit for all the ideas turns out to just be an incoherent squiggle. The editing made me wonder how much of this movie was on the cutting room floor, to the extent that I suspect that some of the main character's blackouts and "time jumps" in the movie were not written or shot that way, but simply jettisoned to keep things moving. Towards the end, I thought about maybe bumping up my rating half a star just for the wild spectacle of the climax (glimpsed in the trailer), which at first I thought might've been a stylistic shout-out to the occult sports imagery in Matthew Barney's CREMASTER CYCLE or maybe to Tarsem Singh's THE CELL. But that big scene (and the movie itself) concludes in such a slapdash, perfunctory manner that I just couldn't do it.